One potential indirect source for validating efficacy appeared to come from senior leaders’ management styles and practices. Sophie discusses the positive impact that knowing management (in the past) trusted the decisions she made as a new head of department had on her.
‘..I said I wanted a wall built at the bottom of this room, which was done,
and it was done within a matter of a few weeks when you requested something. So, it was like we’ve employed you because we think you’re the person for the job, you’ve made some suggestions, we’ve actually listened to them straight away and acted upon them immediately. It was very positive.’
(Sophie, lines 152-157)
Sophie perceived that management believed in her abilities through their actions rather than them directly telling her she was a good teacher/head of department. The implied sense of trust from management is shown by the fact they listened to Sophie’s ideas without question and took action on them quickly. Therefore, trust could be a property of validating efficacy, as its presence suggests that the teacher is skilled and should be allowed to make decisions independently. A teacher that does not feel trusted to make decisions about how they teach or manage colleagues may feel as if their efficacy is being questioned. In contrast, some of the teachers felt that the current school management did not trust them. The quote below highlights how Dominic perceived management to overlook the unique contributions of their staff and to have a lack of faith in their abilities.
‘We have groups of very intelligent people that shouldn’t be treated like a number and be told what to do.’ (Dominic, lines 54-55)
Another indirect source of validating efficacy identified from the data was through professional dialogue with colleagues and comparing colleagues. In particular, a feeling that your practice is being reinforced as positive when you realise other colleagues may not be doing it like that yet or believe that a particular practice that you already do is important. Sophie says that,
‘….people start talking about particular issues and you’ve given your
opinion and you think well actually that’s something that I’ve been doing for a long time and it’s been reinforced…..’ (Sophie, lines 3-5).
Being part of a small department seemed to encourage Sophie to compare herself to colleagues even more when she was taking part in whole school CPD. She felt that she did not have the opportunity to hear conflicting opinions in her
department, therefore she valued it when she could.
Another type of professional dialogue that appeared to influence efficacy
beliefs was when working with trainee or newly experienced teachers. The quote from Suzy below illustrates how helping less experienced colleagues to reflect on their practice engaged Suzy in the same process. It seems that this may have helped to fine tune her reflection techniques and the comparison with others may have helped her to realise that her own teaching was better than she thought.
‘…over the years I’ve worked with NQTs and trainee teachers and I think that’s maybe helped to improve my confidence, in terms of I can reflect on their practice,…and analyse what they’re doing well and what they’re not doing well and that in turn makes me analyse what I’m doing well and what I’m not doing well, so that’s helped improve my confidence.’ (Suzy,
interview 1, lines 108-113)
The use of exam results as a method of validating efficacy arose from the interview with Sophie in which she commented that she knew she was a good teacher and was doing the right things from the fact her students were getting good results. This is an indirect source of efficacy validation because the
teacher in this case was not being told directly that she was a good teacher but was inferring it from the fact that her students performed well.
‘No, because the feedback I get from the students and because the results you get are good I don’t then think, oh, I’m doing something wrong, I need to improve upon this……’ (Sophie, lines 102-104)
However, Sophie was head of a department that had consistently performed very well in exams for a number of years. Consequently, she is likely to have been praised for excellent exam results directly by management in the past and this may have resulted in a perception that good exam results are due to good teaching. So in this case, what appears as an indirect source of efficacy
validation now may in fact be due to direct sources of efficacy validation in the past.
Simon, with a long previous career in industry and now a maths teacher near to retirement, when asked how he knew he was a good teacher stated that:
‘I think the main reason that I will claim to be good is that I seem to be able
with most but not all students to provide them with tactics to allow them to do much better than they otherwise would………… Like I spent a little time working with ___ who was retaking her GCSE Maths exam after goodness knows how many times……and all it took was just a pointer at where she could score and where she couldn’t. So she passed.’ (Simon, lines 136-142)
This illustrates indirect efficacy validation in that his intervention with the student appeared to cause exam success.
When other teachers discussed exam results it was often in a less positive nature, with many viewing their students’ exam results as pressure on them to teach their best. If we go back to Gary’s comment about targets for teachers it is clear that he doesn’t believe that exam results should be used for measuring efficacy by government and that a good teacher does not need to look at the exam results of their students to view themselves as a good teacher. Essentially, he would not use exam results as a source of efficacy validation, unlike his colleague Sophie above.
‘I certainly think there are pressures. I think basically that the most pressure is government insisted. These are the targets that you have to make. Basically…if you don’t meet those targets ie 80% people think you’re a bad teacher and I don’t believe that.’ (Gary, lines 2-5)